SinceThe Rebel Sell came out last year, I had been eagerly looking
forward to getting my hands on Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s book,
which, at first glance, looked as though it might provide a necessary
corrective to some of the more obnoxious forms of "culture jamming" that
some have posited as a superior alternative to other methods of
progressive political organizing.

Alas, despite the
authors’ claim to be arguing for a more coherent and effective Left
politics, the book ends up in strident defense of markets and capitalism.
And, rather than being constructively critical, the tone is mocking
towards any and all who offer up resistance outside of the narrow confines
of Heath and Potter’s recommendations. Indeed, the "counter-culture"
framework that the authors rail against is a rather eclectic straw-man,
into which they lump everyone from Gramsci to environmentalists,
Naomi Klein and
Malcolm X.

The book opens with
a well-deserved salvo at the Blackspot sneaker initiative of
Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn, who claims to offer this subversive
running shoe in order to "un-cool"the likes of Nike. Lasn asserts the
primacy of this sort of symbolic act of resistance to today’s
corporate-driven society, while disparaging government regulation and
political organization as outmoded, "Old Left" thinking. This narrow,
rather self-important form of "culture jamming" deserves to be sharply
rebuked. What is unfair is the way that Heath and Potter graft onto this
criticism their slings and arrows against a wide range of other thinkers
and movements.

Indeed,
The Rebel Sell
meanders in a somewhat random fashion, and includes a lot of frankly
self-indulgent asides that distract from the main arguments. Most glaring
is their apparent fixation with fellow Canadian author Klein and her
best-selling No
Logo, to which, among other things, they assign the blame for the
lack of youth participation in electoral politics. Absurdly summarizing
No Logo as a “how-to-manual for the virtuously hip shopper,” they
assert:

It focuses entirely
on corporate awareness campaigns, consumer boycotts, street protests and
culture jamming, while completely ignoring the role played by citizens
working trough government. (P. 330)

One could certainly
argue that No
Logo is short on analysis of the relations of production, but it
would be unfair to say that the resistance of working people is totally
ignored. Perhaps the most compelling segment of Klein’s book is her
examination of grassroots workers education and organizing in the
Philippines’ Free Trade Zones, and so Heath and Potter’s sweeping
dismissal is disingenuous, and smacks rather of professional jealousy.

The Rebel Sell
authors seem to be themselves unconcerned about workplace resistance, and
tend to assert the primacy of government lobbying and electoral politics.
Much of the Left today -- reeling from decades of defeats and rollbacks
and the collapse of so-called "actually existing socialism" in the
bureaucratic Soviet bloc -- does tend to discount or reject entirely the
importance of the struggle for state power and of efforts to concretely
influence government policy through legislation. Klein herself is not
immune to such autonomous flourishes that discount the importance of this
realm of the struggle. But far more damaging is Heath and Potter’s
cynicism and rejection of extra-parliamentary forms of resistance. The
most successful movements, historically, have been "working on all
levels," and often it has been defiance of existing institutions and laws
that has proven to be fundamental to achieving real change.

The authors also
take their swipes at more established figures and analytical tools of the
Left, often in a similarly superficial manner. Thus,
Antonio
Gramsci is described as:

Arguing that
capitalism created false consciousness in the working classes not by
inspiring particular false beliefs about the operation of the economy, but
by establishing a complete “hegemony,” which in turn reinforced the
system. He suggested, in effect, that the entire culture -- books, music,
painting -- reflected a form of bourgeois ideology, and so needed to be
discarded before the working class could achieve emancipation…Initially
this argument fell upon deaf ears. Marx’s claim that the state was merely
the “executive committee of the bourgeoisie” already smacked of paranoia.
The idea that the bourgeoisie could be controlling the whole culture
seemed even more far-fetched (P. 22).

Now, I realize that
admission to the social sciences in academia requires one to be able to
pontificate about Gramsci, preferably without mentioning that he was a
communist revolutionary languishing in a fascist jail. But Heath and
Potter have really distinguished themselves with this crude bastardization
of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.

In fact, Gramsci’s
writing emphasizes that the ruling class maintains its dominance through a
combination of consent from, and repression of, the oppressed. While the
latter method is more obvious and blatant, the role of consent is equally
critical, and it is established by all the institutions of society, such
as the courts, the media, the educational system, and so on.

A Gramscian approach
to confronting this hegemony, however, has nothing in common with
infantile culture jamming. Rather, it advocates that a strategic long-term
"war of position" be waged by the working classes and their allies. Heath
and Potter, it seems, do not share this perspective. Their own
"counter-hegemonic" position is mostly posturing -- it's a convenient
position from which to attack the Left.

There are real
grounds to criticize many activists and social justice movements for
having insufficiently worked out long-terms strategies, or even short-term
concrete goals for campaigns. The global justice movement (a.k.a.
anti-globalization movement), for instance, was certainly a rather
unfocussed phenomenon, at least as it emerged in the North, as a reaction
to the impact of APEC, the WTO, NAFTA and other trade bodies and
agreements. But the movement did provide an outlet for expression of
opposition to the anti-worker, anti-environmental impacts of these ‘trade’
agreements made in the interest of corporations and the elites. And some
of the depth of today’s anti-war movement -- for its part arising to
confront a very specific act of aggression, the U.S. attack on Iraq -- can
be attributed to the global justice movement’s focus on corporate power
and the imposition of neo-liberalism worldwide.

Again, here, the
anti-globalization movement is crudely dismissed by Heath and Potter as
being "anti-trade" and in contradiction with Third World demands for fair
trade, debt reduction, and an end to protectionism and subsidies in the
developed capitalist countries of the North. While there were elements of
this -- epitomized by the (albeit marginal) participation of
ultra-rightist Pat Buchanan’s followers in the 1999 Seattle protests and
some of the trade union officials’ vulgar nationalism -- on the whole the
movement against neo-liberal globalization has been both led by and
informed by the demands of movements for social justice in the global
South.

At points,
The Rebel Sell
is downright racist; their discussion of the Black liberation struggle in
the United States is especially insidious. In a remarkable passage, the
authors attribute inner city poverty in Detroit to the behavior of its
victims:

At the time of the
catastrophic Detroit riot, for example, the auto industry was booming and
black unemployment in the city was only 3.4 percent. Average black family
income was only 6 percent lower than that of whites…

The images of the
Detroit ghetto that we are now so familiar with -- miles of empty lots and
vacant buildings -- were a consequence of the riots, not one of the
causes. (P. 138-139)

No mention is made
of the segregation within the auto factories, the dangerous and more
backbreaking work assigned to workers of color, nor to the prevalent
police brutality, housing crisis, and other root causes of the 1967 riots
in which 43 people died. Then, absurdly, they would also have us believe
that today’s urban squalor is the fault of the rioters! It is truly
shocking that a book purporting to critique "fuzzy thinking" leftists
would fail to note the economic, structural causes of U.S. urban poverty,
namely de-industrialization and the erosion of, or utter lack of a social
safety net. It would seem that Heath and Potter have not read
Detroit I Do Mind Dying…or anything else about the Black
industrial working class.

In the same segment,
the authors further demonstrate their approach to the race question in the
U.S., lumping political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal in with the likes of
Lorena Bobbitt and the Columbine shooters as evidence of the so-called
counterculture advocates’ tendency to "romanticize criminality" (P. 138).
And speaking of criminal behavior, Heath and Potter even feel the need to
come to the defense of the notoriously misogynistic rapper Eminem (who has
lyrics about "anthrax on your tampax," among other homicidal, anti-women
verses), with a statement that demonstrates their ignorance of the hip hop
genre and the racialized debate surrounding it in the United States:

An enormous amount
of hip hop, for example, is a celebration of frankly antisocial behavior
and attitudes, yet many people feel comfortable criticizing this only when
the words come from the mouths of white rappers. (Eminem is surely right
to point out the hypocrisy of his critics, who take him to task for lyrics
that are often mild by the standards of much contemporary black hip-hop.)
(P.140)

The rebellious roots
of hip hop, and the role of corporate America in co-opting and
depoliticizing the genre, are largely ignored or at least obscured in most
mainstream commentary, and the late-on-the-scene Eminem dwarfs in
prominence and wealth his Black and often politically conscious
trailblazers.

The Rebel Sell,
it turns out, is more about arguing that capitalism can’t be jammed than
it is about the impotence of culture jamming. In a column in the
Policy Options journal (March 2004), Heath vents his spleen at the
"incoherence" of the Canadian Left, chastising the documentary film The Corporation
and its theme that the profit motive inherent in corporations is at the
root of society’s problems. Heath advocates a process of "learning to love
the psychopath," urging the Left to accept market efficiency and give up
the failed ghost of nationalization.

This sentiment
indicates perfectly a total accommodation to the prevailing political
climate -- at least in Canada and North America. It fails to consider, of
course, one of the world’s most explosive social movements in Bolivia,
where millions are demanding nationalization of the country’s natural gas
resources, let alone the rampant privatization by cruise missiles and
invasion forces, as epitomized by the war and occupation in Iraq and
beyond.

In fact, the
authors’ rather parochial outlook colors
The Rebel Sell.
A separate edition with a different title has been published specifically
for the United States, ironic considering their pervasive accusations
against others of posing and style over substance. Perhaps their fondness
of markets has helped them to identify their primary one.

I would be keen to
join Heath and Potter’s rebellion against culture jamming, but I’m not at
all sure that we’re on the same side of the barricades. They are, it
seems, off to the side of the battle, enjoying an intellectualized mockery
of the Left as much as an analysis and criticism of those in power. There
are plenty of activists and intellectuals (the two categories need not,
and should not, be mutually exclusive) out there arguing from within
social justice movements for more effective and multi-faceted political
practice. I don’t think that’s where
The Rebel Sell
is coming from, and so I’m not buying.

Derrick O'Keefewrites for
Seven Oaks, “a magazine of politics, culture and resistance,” based in
Vancouver, BC, where this article first appeared.